After nearly nine months of negotiations an agreement was reached to form a new government in the Netherlands. It has announced Mark Rutte, leader of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) and outgoing prime minister, told the press on Monday, who added that the details of the negotiations will be released on Wednesday.
The new prime minister is still expected to be Rutte, who has led the country since 2010 and who last January he had resigned due to an old case related to family allowances. The fall of the government, however, did not prejudice the formation of a new executive with the same parties that formed the previous majority. The agreement was in fact reached by the four parties that had already been part of the majority from 2017 to 2021: the VVD, the centrist and pro-European party D66, the liberal conservatives of Appello Cristiano Democratico (CDA) and the conservative party Unione Cristiana (CU ).
The negotiations lasted 271 days and were the longest ever in the country’s history. They started after the general elections of last March 17. The VVD had obtained the relative majority of votes, 22 percent, and it seemed clear from the start that he would need the support of at least three smaller parties to form a government. Rutte, the outgoing prime minister, had begun negotiations with the three parties that supported his previous government, in office since 2017, to renew the coalition.
Immediately after the elections, the most likely solution seemed to be that the four parties that had supported the previous executive, VVD, D66, CDA and CU, renew their coalition. However, the negotiations turned out to be much more complicated than expected. They had initially stopped after D66 had tried to involve some minor center-left parties in the discussions, but found opposition from VVD and CDA.
In April, moreover, Rutte had passed one by only three votes motion of no confidence which concerned his conduct during talks to form the new ruling coalition, due to a photograph published in newspapers. The photography showed some documents of the negotiations, including a sheet on which was written: “Omtzigt position, position elsewhere”. The phrase referred to Peter Omtzigt, a member of the CDA very critical of Rutte and well known because it was also thanks to him that the scandal that led to the resignation of the government in January was made public.
According to the opposition parties, Rutte wanted to silence Omtzigt, removing him from the Chamber and assigning him a ministerial post. However, Rutte told reporters that he had never discussed Omtzigt’s political appointment during the negotiations.
The third Rutte government, in office since 2017, he had resigned at the beginning of the year following a parliamentary report which revealed the very aggressive approach used by the state, starting from 2012, to ask about 20 thousand families to return the monthly subsidies received as a contribution to raising children. It was later discovered that the families in question – half of which were made up of people with dual citizenship, therefore of foreign origin – had been prosecuted for a bureaucratic error, and had often been forced into debt to compensate the government.
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